Book Image

Building Big Data Pipelines with Apache Beam

By : Jan Lukavský
Book Image

Building Big Data Pipelines with Apache Beam

By: Jan Lukavský

Overview of this book

Apache Beam is an open source unified programming model for implementing and executing data processing pipelines, including Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL), batch, and stream processing. This book will help you to confidently build data processing pipelines with Apache Beam. You’ll start with an overview of Apache Beam and understand how to use it to implement basic pipelines. You’ll also learn how to test and run the pipelines efficiently. As you progress, you’ll explore how to structure your code for reusability and also use various Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Later chapters will show you how to use schemas and query your data using (streaming) SQL. Finally, you’ll understand advanced Apache Beam concepts, such as implementing your own I/O connectors. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of the Apache Beam model and be able to apply it to solve problems.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1 Apache Beam: Essentials
5
Section 2 Apache Beam: Toward Improving Usability
9
Section 3 Apache Beam: Advanced Concepts

Exploring the Apache Beam capability matrix

Beam makes sure that runners adhere to the Beam model to ensure that pipelines are portable between different runners. There are tests specifically designed to validate the compatibility between runners – these tests are called ValidatesRunner suites and are annotated using the @ValidatesRunner annotation. Any runner author can verify the compatibility of their runner against these tests. However, because runners are developed at different rates, it is possible that a specific runner at a certain moment in time does not support all of the features of the Beam model. Therefore, the complete set of ValidatesRunner tests can be narrowed down by toggling specific features of the model. The tests in the complete suite are then annotated using features such as UsesSetState or UsesSchema. A runner is then allowed to specify features that should be excluded from the tests. These excluded features should then match what is documented in the...